Is repinning as important as pinning from your own blog?

Sunday, August 02, 2015

Everybody knows that bloggers love to pin their blog posts on Pinterest. Bloggers that use BoardBooster often ask us whether their Pinterest marketing strategy should be based on pins from their own blog or involve a certain mix of pins from other websites that they like.

Most pinning experts don't recommend the "selfish" strategy where you pin only from your own website. So, the main question is not whether you should pin from other people's websites but what percentage of pins on your boards should point to your own website versus 3rd party websites. We decided to try finding this "ideal mixture" by analyzing pins found on boards owned by very successful pinners. For the sake of this research, we are using the total number of followers as the measure of success, and focusing on pinners that have more than 10,000 followers.

Our first finding was that successful pinners on average have around 35% of pins that link to their own websites. The other 65% of pins link to 3rd party websites. Then we decided to check if the percentage of "selfish" pins changes as the degree of success (the number of followers) goes up. The chart below shows the percentage of "selfish" pins on the vertical axis and the number of followers on horizontal axis:

Now this is really exciting! It appears that the most successful pinners (ones that have a million followers) are significantly less "selfish" in their pinning than the less successful pinners. On average, pinners with 10,000 followers have 42% of their pins pointing to their own website while pinners with a million followers have only 11% of such "selfish" pins. This shows that Pinterest is encouraging us to be more social and spend more time exploring and repinning other people's pins.

Do you know what percentage of your pins link to your own website? If you use BoardBooster, you can find your recent rate of "selfish" pins on top of the Pinning History report. If your rate is too high, you might want to start scheduling more repins from other high quality boards.

That's all for today! If you decide to test the less selfish pinning strategy, please share your results with us at Support@BoardBooster.com!